Maine Has More Than 40 Places Named After Countries, Foreign Cities

Maine is famous around the world for its lobster, but when you're in Maine... you don't have to drive very far to find yourself in Mexico, China, Rome, or Peru.

Yup, these are all the actual names of Maine cities, towns and communities. There are actually more than 40 of them across the state! Sitting around the dinner table, I could come up with 10, maybe 15 of these. Turns out, I was missing most of them.

There are three kinds of town names on this list...

1) Town names that you clearly recognize as foreign names, like Paris, Denmark, Sweden, China and Mexico.

2) Town names that we're so used to using every day, it's weird to think that they're names of other places, like Scarborough, Berwick, Bangor, Falmouth, Cumberland, and York.

3) Names of places that you might not recognize as foreign at all, or you might not even know where they are in Maine, like Sorrento, Corea and Surry.

Here's the full list of Maine communities named after foreign places and people, according to DeLorme's Maine Geographic Book of Lists:

Alfred

Athens

Bangor

Bath

Belfast

Belgrade

Berwick

Biddeford

Bremen

Bristol

Calais

Cambridge

China

Corea

Corinth

Cornish

Cumberland

Denmark

Dover

Dresden

Falmouth

Frankfort

Lebanon

Limerick

Lisbon

Madrid

Mexico

Moscow

Naples

Norway

Oxford

Paris

Peru

Poland

Rome

Scarborough

Somerset

Sorrento

Stockholm

Surry

Sweden

Troy

Verona

Vienna

Wales

Wells

Woolwoch

Yarmouth

York

...did they miss any?

There are a ton of other places in Maine that share the names of foreign places too, but they might not have been named *after* those other locations, so they might not appear on this list.